What horror movies and video games share in common

Late last night I tried my hand at posting to Medium for the first time. It was something I was originally going to post here but, you know, it ended up over there instead, so whatever. The blarticle at Medium is called “On Consuming Media Responsibly,” and it’s all about my love of violent, misogynistic horror movies. I’m a student of the form, I get overexcited when a movie tries anything new, and I also enjoy movies that suck and do everything wrong. (The greatest insult, I always warn, is just being boring, and even then I don’t mind being bored when a movie is otherwise doing good work.)

I bring up my horror movie fetish because Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian is currently in the throes of the usual gamer backlash, which is really alarming, because she isn’t asking anyone to give anything up. No one is saying “video games are bad, burn them”; Sarkeesian is simply focusing a critical or analytical lens on video games, in a way that is surprisingly nonconfrontational and not even particularly judgemental. Well. All my thoughts are actually already in the Medium link, so check it out.

Medium as a medium

I really like what Medium and Zeen are both trying to do—but I have to wonder whether content creators and distributors are on the cusp of getting all pinboarded and Tumblr’d out. These are platforms that kind of get their content for free, to which I’m opposed, but they also “curate” what becomes visible, so a newcomer has a much better shot at being read. This isn’t a new publishing model, no, but it does work.

What’s most interesting about Medium, though, is you can invite other collaborators to make edits before publishing, and then once it’s published readers can comment in the margins. A lot of this ends up being minor recommendations and tweaks, so the work kind of turns into this living document. Which is weird—an article might look completely different if you decide to read it a day later—but as a result people have been really responsive even in other channels, especially on Twitter.